


Our Souls Alight

by azcendio



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmates, hahaha anyway here's wonderful soulmates au with a dash of angst but an end of happiness, inspired by a death cab for cutie song properly titled you've haunted me all my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 04:48:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14073222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azcendio/pseuds/azcendio
Summary: Souls are an energy like anything else, floating and searching for interaction.  They alight in hope of finding their charge, their companion in the vacuum of space.  They travel unspeakable distances, reaching out and back to the time when everything was one, to the moment of the Big Bang, when the first spark lit everything alive.  They long to close the distance between the shattered pieces of that moment, to find the soul that once so tightly held onto them.  So they shine, small beacons calling out into the void hoping to be seen.  But space is vast and cold, and souls- beautiful as they are- don’t shine as bright as stars.Ben knows this, and yet he can't help but reach for the light of Rey's soul, shimmering and smiling beside him.  A cruel trick of light.





	Our Souls Alight

_ Love is a trick of the light.  It shoots straight until something makes it bend, revealing its true colors.  It is blindingly harsh, and hazily soft, growing long and filling the space between ribs and the hollows of your heart, promising warmth and safety.  Until it fades, casting shadows under the eyes until eventually that is all that’s left.  _

Ben learns this at a young age.

“Ben?  Ben, sweetheart, it’s time to eat,” a soft voice drifts through the lock on his bedroom door.  But Ben’s attention is elsewhere. He sits on his bed, a toy forgotten on his lap, his eyes wide and curious.  They watch a girl, who lies on the floor, her face parted by the setting sun, and the drowsy rays spread honey across her freckled cheeks and bare shoulders.  She’s completely unaware of the light shining in her eyes, highlighting the golden roots under the green. She’s completely unaware of all of Ben’s toys, disregarding them completely for a small object in her hand she twirls and dives through the air; a stick boy, Ben thinks, trying to make sense of the twigs bundled together but it moves so fast and she’s much nicer to look at than her toy-

Her eyes, starlight in evening, turn and catch him staring.  She grins, the light of it matching the rest of her so sweetly, and she waves.

“Ben?”  The voice pours, flooding his room.  He doesn’t seem surprised by it, just turns his head- reluctantly, wanting to watch the girl and where her stick boy is going (the moon, maybe).  His eyes are still wide as he takes in his mother and her concern. Her eyebrows are knitted together. He’s seen that look before. He knows it’s best not to lie.  

“There’s a girl in my room.”

Leia’s eyebrows converge at the center of her confusion, her eyes scanning the darkening bedroom of her son.  There is no girl. Just Ben, sitting. Alone. 

“You don’t see her, do you,” Ben says quietly, dejectedly, when his mother remains silent, thinking.  Her face gradually softens with realization, and she smiles, sweeps into the room and takes Ben in her arms.

“Oh, Ben,” she says, her voice wrapping around him lovingly.  She kisses his forehead, motherly hands nested in the great mop of soft hair.  Gently, she brushes it, and the chaos in his young mind eases stroke by stroke.  “No, I don’t see her, but that means something amazing has happened.”

He eyes the girl suspiciously, but she’s still smiling at him, her head cocked to the side in wonder.  She’s completely forgotten about her toy, dropped to the floor and sinking into shadow. He can see only her now.

“Amazing?” He murmurs, unsure of himself and the fluttering in his stomach when the girl stands up and walks towards him.

“You’ve been kissed by the light,” his mother whispers, and it’s a reverent secret pressed onto his skin, a blessing from a mother’s lips to a son’s heart.  “As I was.”

He doesn’t understand what his mother is saying, or why the girl stops short of his bed and stares into his eyes with a loneliness he’s only ever seen in the mirror.  He doesn’t understand why the loneliness lingers as the rest of her fades- first her brown hair blending into the walls, her small frame into the shelves, her smile into the crescent moon outside his window.  

“That’s your soulmate,” he hears his mother sigh contently, a wave of relief rolling off her; his loneliness, she knows now, won’t cast such a dark shadow on his life.  “You’re seeing the light of her reaching out to you. As I saw your father.”

It’s meant to comfort him, like the waving caresses pulling him deeper into his mother’s embrace, but fear clings to him in the spaces where his mother cannot reach him.  He thinks of the girl’s eyes, dwindling in the distant light of stars- intangible, isolated, inconsolable. He thinks of his parents, who love each other - this much he knows - yet fight with fire every day- about his mother’s work, about his father’s ship, about him.  And he thinks if that’s what a kiss looks like, he doesn’t want any part of it. Even if it’s with that girl- that soft and sweet trick of the light.

_ Souls are an energy like anything else, floating and searching for interaction.  They alight in hope of finding their charge, their companion in the vacuum of space.  They travel unspeakable distances, reaching out and back to the time when everything was one, to the moment of the Big Bang, when the first spark lit everything alive.  They long to close the distance between the shattered pieces of that moment, to find the soul that once so tightly held onto them. So they shine, small beacons calling out into the void hoping to be seen.  But space is vast and cold, and souls- beautiful as they are- don’t shine as bright as stars. _

Ben knows this, because his uncle tells him as much.

He’s in a room that isn’t his, refuses to call his, after his parents have moved too many times to reasonably count.  There are shadows in this room, dark veins of them spreading out from where his body sits rigid on the edge of the bed.  There’s an anger in him he can’t quite put to words, and it has something, or everything, to do with the  _ gift  _ his mother and uncle swear he has.   _ To see the dimmest, rarest light, across unknown distances, it’s a gift,  _ his mother had told him.  But with light comes darkness, crawling through his veins, staining violence on his skin.  And sometimes the darkness has a voice, low and persistent, paralyzing him with night terrors.  This side of the gift, his mother and father have never seen before. Have no words or context for it.  But Luke, his uncle…

He sits beside Ben, a patient statue in the silence.  He says nothing of the shattered glass, or the glitching hologram of another world laying like a corpse on the floor.  Instead, he stares out the window, as Ben does, at the cars floating through the twilight, at the sun and moons struggling to admire one another.

“They call it a gift because it’s given to us in goodwill, whether we want it or not.  Whether it serves its purpose or collects dust on the shelf.”

Ben grits his teeth, lips quivering, eyes burning but steady on the horizon.  He swallows something pointed and burdensome, feels it stretch his throat and tear at it until it lands with a sickening thud in his stomach.  It sinks into the lining, making a home in the acid. 

“Leia, your mother- she didn’t see the light of your father for years.  Until one day it finally reached her, in the middle of a political debate.  Not long after that she found him, nearly stranded herself in another star system just to get to him- but you know the story well enough.”

The arguing, the slamming doors, the stretches of peace in which his mother’s smile and his father’s laugh was enough to drive away his frustrations and fears.  Yeah, he knows the story, and he knows how it’ll end for them, for him.

“Not everyone’s story ends that way.”

The girl comes to him then, a ray of sunshine clinging onto the sky even as evening turns to night.  She stands in the middle of the room, her eyes staring off past the wall, at something that makes her lips sink until she’s looking down at the ground, her face eagerly reflected off each shard of glass.  There are traces of trouble at the edges of her eyes and the quiver of her chin but, as the sun strays further beneath the horizon, everything about her changes in the light, softening and smoothing over. She closes her eyes and takes a breath, centering herself as he wishes he could.  

Every time he sees her, it’s a fierce burn in his chest, a scarring kind of reverence with which his whole body shakes and aches.  Today is no different, and she has not changed since the last time he saw her only days ago. She comes in moments when he’s most afraid, a beacon of hope stealing through the cracks to guide him back to sanity.  

“I saw my soulmate, too, but… souls can be a bit like distant stars.  Old, faint.”

But she isn’t old, or faint.  She’s golden, kissed by multiple suns, the freckles of her childhood multiplying in adolescence.  They are the shadows of stars on her radiant skin, shoulders still bare and strong- bearing the weight of those stars with stubborn resilience.  She sits on the glass, which glints with the light of her. She’s waiting for something- someone. She’s still looking off into a horizon he can’t see.  He wonders what she sees, if it’s day or night, if she sees the same sky he does. Her head turns, drifting back to him, and the look in her eyes speaks of distance and longing.  No, he concludes. It is not the same sky. She is out of reach, despite being right at his fingertips.

“By the time you see them, they’re already gone.”

On cue, the light shifts, the sun sets, and the glass on the floor goes black.  The girl is no more.

“You should give speeches more often, uncle,” Ben replies flatly, swallowing another shard of hopelessness.  “You have a horrible way with words.”

“Thanks, kid.”

Quietly, Ben gets up, his legs bowed, awkward and towering as he tries to bend down and pick up the mess he’s made.  Luke tries to help.

“What I mean to say is: not everyone gets to see that light, that rare glimpse at the person who is ourselves reflected across space.  Most people go their whole lives searching the sky for someone they can’t even see. But you… whether it’s fleeting or far off, you get to see her.  Cherish that. Hold onto that.”

He does.  He holds on tightly, and the starry glass digs deep into his palm, drawing blood.

The next day, he’s still holding on- onto the gears of his father’s ship, that glitching hologram beside him mapping out all the places  _ she  _ might shine from.  It’s reckless and spiteful, and he steals off into the stars in search of her.  Desperate to find the beating, radiating pulse of energy that soothes his. That soothes him in hopes of being a match, an equilibrium.  

Ben has no idea where he’s going, except that he must.   _ He must. _  He refuses to wait until fate brings them together, until her light inevitably, permanently fades from the sky.  He’s tired of a gift that keeps giving only half way. Tired of seeing and not touching the light, not holding it and being held by it.  He’s tired.

He crash-lands on a moon where sunlight is harsh and near-constant.  He thinks here is where he’ll find her, wandering in the desert with the stars on her back and the sun in her smile, searching for respite from the heat and gravity of it all.  But he’s the one wandering, feet sinking deep into the sand, body lurching forward into a foreign landscape with no name on his lips to aid in his quest. 

Yet, somehow he finds her.  She stands, an oasis, in the midst of a chaotic market.  She’s just as he’s always seen her: incandescent, muted clothes highlighting the richness of her, brown hair thoughtfully pulled back and up away from the heat- but strands of it just can’t keep away from her, from touching the nape of her neck or affectionately brushing the blush of her cheek.  He drinks her in, every part of her, having never tasted something so clear and light in his life. And he races towards her, a man to sanctuary- fights through the resistant, harsh terrain to get there. At last. He reaches for her. For the smile, the soft bending of light. He reaches-

His hand is broad and bleeding across her jaw, her cheek, fingertips needing to know the feel of her hair.  He gets the breath of it, a whisper of a sensation- it’s the feel of floating dust in the light, a sparse substance that in no way satisfies his need for her.  

Her eyes are locked onto his, wide with surprise and momentary joy- slowly falling, dimming until they’re crestfallen on his outstretched hand.  

She opens her mouth to say something they both know he won’t hear.

And then she’s gone.  In broad, honest daylight, where he knew he’d find her.  She is gone.

_ Love is a trick of the light, and soulmates are a joke the cosmos play for lack of anything better to do.   _

Ben has taken to talking to her, even though she can’t hear and neither of them are very good at reading lips.  He does like looking at hers move, though. He likes looking at them a lot.

At some point, he stopped contemplating if soulmates could be platonic.  He’s sure there are those kinds of lights, soft beams of support and guidance.  But he’s long learned this isn’t that kind of light, that kind of bond. It stretches beyond and encircles him in a dizzying array of want and need.  Sometimes it’s a kind warmth when he is alone and frozen in thought. Other times it is searing judgment when he needs it most, but wants it least. And other times it is a kindling fire he knows he cannot touch, but wants to.  Needs to.

He has always needed her, since the moment he first saw her, a waking dream in the middle of his bedroom.  He wonders if it’ll ever stop, this need for a soul he has never met yet has always known. He thinks of his parents, of their love for each other blinding them to the cracks in their relationship, how ultimately they fell through.  As often as soulmates come together, more often they drift farther apart. And Ben wonders which he’d prefer: to never realize the dream and simply stay suspended in the glimmer of light, or to touch reality and feel it skin and bones and kindred soul and forever fear her leave of him.

It’s been years now, since impulse drove him to steal his father’s ship in search of that reality only to touch sand.  Since then, he’s stopped thinking of where to find her. Though they talk, or try to, they never exchange names. Only glances, and wishes, and smiles.  Sometimes, they sit close enough to touch - on his bed, the floor, in the middle of a crowded park - and sometimes he dares to stretch out his fingers, to skim over the light of hers, his hand a looming shadow that nearly engulfs her whole.  But she still shines through, sitting there, letting him hold a figment of her soul. And always she holds his.

He thinks maybe, just maybe, this is enough.  It’s a gift half-given, half curse, but seeing her through the darkness- it is enough.

This is what keeps him sane during the stretches of time he does not, cannot see her, when the shadows overrule the light and turn his vision black.  When souls that aren’t hers whisper, lost and spiteful in his ear and his nights are filled with terrors of shattering storms and silent voids. He holds onto the faint glow of her, an after-image burned onto his eyelids, to the trace of fingers small and shimmering, weaving through his.  He holds onto it, dim as it is, until he can see her again.

He sees her again, sitting on a bench, floating amidst a sea of strangers.  She is lost, beside herself, light perplexingly, distressingly dwindling. Her skin doesn’t glow like it should, shoulders covered in a grey shawl and hair fallen, framing her face in a way he’s not used to.  Her lips, they’re frowning and eyes glaring down at a wristband she’s tapping vigorously. A hologram glitches, a map of the city shuttering before shutting down completely, disappearing. She looks near tears with frustration, and something else.

He usually makes himself known first, before touching her- ever since the incident on the moon.  But there is a devastating quiver to her brow. Ben reaches out to her, his thumb brushing over the tension, wanting to soothe it. 

He feels delicate, fine hairs.  And the shock of touch, a spasm of connection magnetic and maddening.

She jolts, and he freezes.  Hand still outstretched. A very real shadow cast across her flushed cheek.  Her eyes are locked onto his, sealing them in a vacuum. Just the two of them, two lights bending into one another.  Unseen by anyone else. Not caring to be seen by anyone but each other.

_ It’s a trick of the light _ , Ben tells himself to mute the screaming hope erupting through his chest, simultaneously shattering and rebuilding matter.   _ It’s a trick of the light. _

Her mouth opens in a tentative, expectant smile.  He braces himself for the silence, solitude, the fade out-

“I’m Rey.”

 


End file.
